In the healthiest cultures, when news breaks, here’s what staffers can count on:

We have a plan. We don’t have to scramble to figure out how to respond each time a big story breaks. Everyone on our team has an understanding of the key roles that need to be filled – both in the field and at the mother ship. We automatically call in and report for duty. We adapt the basic plan by situation and story, and we’re never caught flat-footed.

Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Gerard Baker spoke at City University, London, Monday, and Journal social media editor Sarah Marshall took notes. Baker went through a list of things the Journal is doing that he thinks other news orgs should do, including being “genuinely independent”: “You cannot become dependent on the companies on which you are reporting,” Marshall reports he said. “We need to be mindful of journalistic ethics and standards.”

These works are inspiring. They’re also instructive. Starting with the “secrets” shared with us by their creators, we’ve extracted some great lessons about how to learn to do better journalism, and paired them with questions to ask in your own newsroom.

With Relay, a new platform for live blogging in all its forms, Randy Abramson hopes he has solved a problem for news organizations in need of a central, well-designed hub for multimedia in breaking-news situations.

In his current, more strategic role, Abramson has been able to step back and evaluate how news organizations overall cover breaking news. He said coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and the Washington Navy Yard shootings convinced him that news organizations are well-prepared for news gathering in terms of staffing levels and reporting tools. But the trouble, he said, is that the presentation is so often lacking, especially on tablets and smartphones. Read more

Among the members of the media reporting via Twitter from the scene of Friday’s shooting at Arapahoe High School in Colorado, Denver Post reporter Ryan Parker’s tweets stood out. He posted photos, news and on occasion wrote about what it’s like to cover an event like this.

Look at this page on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ website and feel a pain in your gut. The site documents the 45 journalists who have been killed on the job worldwide this year. Most were covering human rights, politics and/or crime when they died.

Behind the buzz-buzz of a smartphone alert could come anything: News of the death of Osama bin Laden, or a “we have to talk” text, or an email with that job offer, finally.

Or it could be news of a Miley Cyrus twerk, or a “remember to buy milk” text, or an email with an offer to come to Best Buy to purchase a Surface tablet.

Push notifications — full of promise but too often a drag — make for the most intriguing feature of the new Breaking News app for iOS. Although it emphasizes customization, the free app still seems aimed to add to the overwhelming number of chimes emitted from my phone each day.

But there could be a way to make it work for those like me who feel overwhelmed by our phones. Read more

Today’s shooting at the Los Angeles airport is another reminder that covering breaking news can be fraught with opportunities to get it wrong.

A fake tweet picked up by media outlets in the heat of the shooting coverage is an example.

Here is a list of resources for covering shootings and, once the rush is over, some training suggestions to consider that can help newsrooms develop the best practices for shooting stories and breaking news in general:

Large news organizations flood the zone. Live blogs kickoff. Scanners get fired up. Geofeedia and other tools are focused on the location and what people are saying, sharing. Officials are swamped with phone calls. People on Facebook are swamped with interview and information requests. Journalists with sources press them for information, anything.

Breaking news is never pretty — anyone who hungers for facts and speed during a story as fluid as Monday’s shootings in Washington, D.C., is asking for a lot. Still, there were some notable screwups today, like…